Border Interrogations

Questioning Spanish Frontiers

Benita Samperdro Vizcaya, Simon Doubleday, Benita Samperdro Vizcaya, Simon Doubleday

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780857450357
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Under the current cartographies of globalism, where frontiers mutate, vacillate, and mark the contiguity of discourse, questioning the Spanish border seems a particularly urgent task. The volume engages a wide spectrum of ambivalent regions—subjects that currently are, or have been seen in the past, as spaces of negotiation and contestation. However, they converge in their perception of the "Spanish" nation-space as a historical and ideological construct that is perpetually going through transformations and reformations. This volume advocates the position that intellectual responsibility must lead us to engage openly in the issues underlying current social and political tensions.

Chapter 1

Europe’s “Last” Wall:

Contiguity, Exchange, and Heterotopia in Ceuta, the Confluence of Spain and North Africa

Parvati Nair

As myth would have it, Hercules, in the course of performing his labors, marked the limits of the world as it was then known: the Pillars of Hercules, on the western shores of the Mediterranean, are located on the southern tip of Europe and on the northern tip of Africa. Here, where the Mediterranean spills out onto the wide Atlantic, Jebel Tariq, now better known as Gibraltar, and Jebel Musa on the Moroccan mainland, near the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, form an imaginary hang-line between the known world and the unknown. Present here since antiquity, therefore, has been the unsettling proposition of the unknown, the strange, the other. Jebel Musa, a promontory that slopes down to the sea, stretches out against the Mediterranean skyline, like a woman supine on her back. Known, thus, in Spanish as “La Mujer Muerta”, or the dead woman, the sleeping body of Jebel Musa silently suggests a danger zone of alterity, challenged, nevertheless, by the unchecked flow of the waters below.

Ceuta, or Sebta as it is known in Morocco, is one of two Spanish enclaves in North Africa. A small port of no more than 18.5 square kilometers and a perimeter of 28 kilometers, it is surrounded to the north by the waters of the Straits of Gibraltar, themselves the line of slippage between the Mediterranean sea and the Atlantic ocean. The land around it belongs to Morocco and the nearest town is Tetuán. The physical location of Ceuta, both a part of Spain and separated from it, is weighted with geopolitical significance: at once a bastion of European presence in the region, anchored by the weight of colonial history, and an interrogation of Europe’s relation to its North African “other,” it remains a bone of contention between nations and governments that are neighbors, yet differentiated by degrees of wealth and empowerment. Similarly, the blue waters of Ceuta are a subject of litigation between Spain and Morocco, as fishing disputes continue to rage between the two countries. Ceuta, together with its sister city Melilla¹ near Nador in Morocco, marks Europe’s southernmost border. Paradoxically, its location in the Maghreb looks northward “at Europe” even as it outshines its postcolonial neighbor with the lure of European economic might. As such, and in its physical isolation from the Spanish peninsula, it presents a fortified and intensified example of the border constructed to demarcate the European contours of the Western hegemony from the neighboring Third World. In its dangerous overspill into territories of alterity, Ceuta also invites a questioning of such borders and, by extension, of the means by which such hegemony is constructed and maintained.

This chapter will attempt an anthropology of the border as currently exemplified in Ceuta. It will explore the means by which cultural and social borders both subvert and bolster national or state borders; it will argue that border identities are shifting and contingent, at odds in their liminality with the state forces that seek to contain them. Such a contradictory context of obscure slippage in the face of enforced border controls inevitably poses a question mark around the liberal democracy that is a hallmark of the western hegemony. Democracy, a buzz word in post-Francoist Spain, inextricably tied to the ever-increasing ventures of late capitalism and reiterated politically as an ideological counterpoint to nearly four decades of dictatorship, stumbles across its own limits at those points where First World spills into Third. Here, where economic fault lines come into play, the urgency to reinforce borders is greatest, precisely to ensure the free circulation of the democratic project within the privileged spaces of the West. The theoretical line of analysis that I pursue will be drawn from the concepts of contiguity, as developed by Homi Bhabha and heterotopia, a term established by Michel Foucault and rethought by David Harvey. My claim is that Ceuta, at the interface of two nations, two continents and two levels of economic and political power, is at once a space of differentiation and a space of contestation, exchange, slippage. Ceuta’s status as one of the seventeen regional autonomies of Spain elevates it to a status above that of its less affluent neighbor, Morocco. Nevertheless, the physical proximity of Morocco leads to close contact over and against border demarcations. If Ceuta is a part of Spain, then it is also intrinsically conjoined to Morocco, both through current social and cultural practices and through a history of interrelation. As such, Ceuta as border is also a bridge between First World and Third. Like other border spaces, most especially the town of Tijuana on the United States-Mexico border, the city of Ceuta exemplifies the conflicting dynamics of border controls. A study of the politics of space and place in Ceuta cannot ignore the underground exchanges and dialectical relations that are ongoing between Ceuta and Morocco. Thus, a gap exists between official discourses, on the one hand, and social practices, on the other, which turn this border city into a “heterotopia,” or space of numerous, fragmentary, contiguous, and contradictory worlds.

The research process for this analysis involved fieldwork in Ceuta. As such, and in the course of attempting to gain information on the city as a border space, I was acutely aware of the many borders that are perhaps impossible to cross and that must be borne in mind when conducting academic studies on immigration. In the first instance, I was only a visitor to the city. With limited resources and time at my disposal, the urge to collect information was constantly tempered by what appeared appropriate or possible. Equally, there was much that I discovered by chance. Secondly, interviews and conversations with “locals” or immigrants were inevitably framed by how they perceived me.² My key informant, Shamsul, a Bangladeshi immigrant, was forthcoming largely due to a racial, linguistic, and cultural commonality between himself and myself, whereas several undocumented African immigrants whom I met were unwilling to reveal their stories to me. Understandably, a sociopolitical divide separated the route of illicit migration that they had taken to reach Spain and the apparently “licit” nature of my enquiry and my presence there. Thirdly, there is the awareness of a chasm between the analysis of the academy, the production of discourses of knowledge and power, carried out within the safety of an institutional environment, and the harsh realities of immigrant experience. A certain discomfiture is in order, I believe, when academically approaching issues where human rights and human lives are at stake. Nevertheless, it is precisely such efforts that reveal the contingent frames surrounding academic discourse. Such issues of reflexivity have been raised in recent years by anthropologists, such as James Clifford (1997), Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992), and others. In writing this chapter, I shall attempt to reflect the many voices and faces that I heard and saw on the border, in the hope that by so doing, and by self-consciously foregrounding the tenuous ground beneath studies of identity, the many more that I did not see or hear may gain a presence. I am aware too of the many frames and boundaries that I impose, unwittingly or not, in the translation or translocation of lived or narrated experience into written text. What became clear in the course of my efforts was that the border in this day and age is never unified, quantifiable or easily located. Borders overlap and become entangled with one another. They move in diverse directions and can be viewed from many angles. Most of all, there is a confounding coincidence of different spaces and times at the border.

Contiguity and Heterotopia

To state simply, then, that Ceuta is a border town between North and South, one that both bridges and divides two continents, is in many ways to elide the complexity of the counter-movements that are present there. Attempts to locate the border towns of Ceuta and Melilla in terms of either the First or Third World will inevitably fail: they are neither one nor the other, nor indeed the sum of their different parts. Instead, these frontier towns inhabit the ambivalence of the borderline, a contradictory and shifting space that presents varied perspectives. Furthermore, the diversities present in Ceuta defy the leveling and restrictive discourses of multiculturalism. The attempt to frame Ceuta, then, flounders, for the border space—ironically—refuses delimitation.

If, for historical reasons, Ceuta has long been a place of political and cultural complexity, then, in today’s world, after 11 September 2001, it is all the more so. The ideals of law, citizenship, and human rights, those pillars of the modern nation-state as constructed by the European imagination, are put to the test at this point, when they come up against one of Fortress Europe’s “last” walls. Late capitalism and globalization have led to a complex web of economic, political, and cultural connections between the global dominant powers and their postcolonial others. In his The End of History and the Last Man (1992), Francis Fukuyama famously announced “the end of history.” By this, he meant that following the break-up of the Soviet Union, liberal democracy would become an all-encompassing ideological structure, unchallenged by any other. Furthermore, such liberal democracy was tied, in his view, to global market economics. This dependence on the marketplace in turn creates a rift between the ideology of liberal democracy and the realization of democracy in terms of lived practice as exercised by states and global alliances. This is poignantly in evidence in the context of global labor migration. In counter-movement to the extension of Western-centered capitalist enterprise across the world is the migration of persons to the Western metropole. Today, over 200 million persons are on the move around the globe, migrating northward from the impoverished South, often staking their lives to cross the global economic divide and the barbed gateways of border zones, such as Ceuta. Denied citizenship or legitimacy through illicit entry into Europe, such migrants nevertheless contribute both to the economic and cultural wealth of the host nations.

It is in this context of troubling and unfulfilled democracy that Homi Bhabha develops his notion of contiguity. He states that, “The contingencies and contiguities of the new cartography of globalism mutate and vacillate, mediate and morph …”(Bhabha 2002, 351). Rather than see current political, economic, and cultural practice as contradictions—a term that itself implies separate and contrary categories—Bhabha emphasizes the conflictual but communicative categories that comprise the global market economy and the impact upon other areas of lived practice. Borders, in such a context, both territorial and imagined, are double-edged, at once open and closed, at once mobile and controlled, wavering in the overall contingencies of global time and space. “Contiguity,” he tells us, is “a way of dealing with the ‘partial or incubational combination of old and new’ (which) makes us attentive to the ‘jurisdictional unsettlement’ that marks the life-world of our times” (Bhabha 2002, 354). Hence the double horizon that he sees hovering over global discourse where the “national” persists, as the transnational or global predominates in a variety of spheres. It might be worth adding that regulating these contiguous discourses and connecting their apparent contradictions is the marketplace. That double horizon, the borderline between the national and the transnational, must be determined in line with market fluxes. Its effects too must be read in this light. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the twilit edges of the First World. The open internal borders of the Schengen space—the free, unregulated circulation of currency, persons, and goods—are shut down at Ceuta. Here, the national asserts its old, historical self and claims the right to draw the line. Equally, such a line is daily challenged both by the processes of cultural intercourse with nearby Morocco and by the influx of migrants entering this policed space, spurred on by the ubiquitous migrant dream of “a better life.”

The simultaneity and multiplicity of spaces that Ceuta presents can also be viewed in terms of Foucault’s notion of heterotopia. Foucault first developed his notion of heterotopia in 1966, in his book The Order of Things. Here, his focus was on the heterotopia of discourse and the multiplicity of language. Later, in a lecture delivered in 1967 and published posthumously, “Des espaces autres,” Foucault applies this same concept to space. He states that the nineteenth century focus on history has given way to a new concern with space. “We are,” he tells us, “in the epoch of simultaneity, we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.” Foucault viewed this focus on space as itself a stage in history whereby a shift has taken place from a singularly diachronic paradigm to one which is determined by a spatial paradigm. What ensues is a double logic of shared space together with the simultaneous juxtaposition of different spaces: space, no longer lived in the singular or abstract but in terms of plurality. By extension, given that this shift has taken place within the larger paradigm of history, time too is lived in terms of plurality and simultaneity.

The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites, which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another. (Foucault 1986, 23)

This view of spatialization has a definite impact on questions of power and subjectivity. While Foucault wrote of space and time in the singular, his argument opens to the question of how this impacts a world of complex geopolitical, technological, and economic networks. The spatialized subject of late capitalism occupies numerous, possibly incompatible, sites or locations. Indeed, in an increasingly virtual world, many of these spaces may be disengaged from place. The time of place and the time of space may thus not coincide. Sites, whether virtual or not, may themselves not be self-contained and distinct units. The heterotopic subject treads numerous borderlines and the heterotopic city becomes a place of constant crossings.

Bearing in mind that Foucault’s lecture was written nearly four decades ago, we come up against the need to reassess it in the context of late modernity. If heterotopia is a space of otherness or difference that allows for the production of “alternatives,” as David Harvey suggests (2000, 184), then the complication of space and time that both constitutes and results from the socioeconomic and cultural configurations of late capitalism further scatter spatiality and complicate temporal experience. Foucault’s heterotopia was a space of radical organization and practice, one that disrupts the normative and offers new perspectives. Harvey delineates the effects of late capitalism on this dialectic. In particular, he marks a tension that has arisen between space and place:

The dialectical oppositions between place and space, between long- and short-term horizons, exist within a deeper framework of shifts in time-space dimensionality that are the product of underlying capitalist imperatives to accelerate turn-over times and to annihilate space by time. (Harvey 1996, 247)

This process, which he terms “time-space compression,” is fundamentally tied to capitalism and calls for a new understanding of the dynamics and dialectics of contemporary life. Space, a constitutive frame of material life, must be viewed in terms, not only of organization, as suggested by Foucault, but also in terms of social practices. In this way, the geopolitics of spaces and places determined by the acquisitional thrusts of capitalism can find their dialectical and competing relation to one another and to time.

Once again, when viewed in terms of late capitalism and its sociocultural effects, the double horizon perceived by Bhabha resulting from the contiguity of current cultural processes comes into view. This time, though, when considered in terms of the tenuous junctures of today’s spaces and times, it is seen to mark out a global landscape of difference, unevenness, injustice. In an overridingly capitalist world, the pitfalls of difference are most keenly felt and displayed in economic terms. The dynamics of contemporary life, issues of class relations or social justice, are mapped out in terms of an often unsituated and contingent geography of economic, and by extension political, difference. Hence, even as the dialectic of difference grows, so the gap between space and place, between the free floating and the embodied, between the mobile and the landlocked, between the winners and the losers of capitalist risk ventures, expands. The age of late capitalism spatializes difference and so threatens to dematerialize it; equally, it is an age where the periphery, the border, the margin, is ever more marked and more in evidence. If all existence is turned borderline, then, the border too becomes a space of contiguity and heterotopia. Multi-hued and radical in its proposition of difference, it is the frame within which otherness encounters its own alterities.

Border Spaces

To the naked eye the electronic fence seems almost aesthetic. There is something lace-like, diaphanous, in the intricacy of its appearance. There is no barbed wire here, no massive, stone wall. The filigree work glints in the Mediterranean sun. Yet, it is this fence, more than the difference in the uniforms of the guards or the passing of customs posts, that confirms to me that I am in Europe. There are as many men in djellabas on this side as on the other, perhaps even more. Rif women walk through the frontier posts as if there were no frontier at all. Unlike me, they do not wait for their passports to be stamped, for their visas to be scrutinized. The urchins approach me as I walk into Spain; they clutch my bag and offer to carry it. I know they will want a tip, but I cannot tip them all. They fight amongst one another for the little I give them. A frontier guard walks by and they scatter. The taxi driver chats as he takes me into the center of town. Have I come for windsurfing, he asks, for just a few days in the sun? The seafood restaurants are excellent, he tells me, and shopping is good.

This analysis of Ceuta embarks from a view of this small border city as a locus of difference. To think in terms of difference, as of the nation, the city or any other bounded space in the imaginary, is to think in terms of borders. The affirmation of collective identities and the play of power relations between such entities inevitably rely upon the construction of boundaries. The border, as a site of demarcation and as a point of contact and cultural exchange, selectively facilitates or obstructs passage. Located on the border are the symbols of power; in practice on the border is the exercise of the same. Thus, nation-states stress their lines of demarcation once these have been recognized by international law, as the modern drive to map the world in terms of nations or other legitimized spaces relies on the borderline as a marker of distinction. While state boundaries define the legal limits of sovereignty, these can nevertheless be subverted, challenged or reinforced, as the case may be, by cultural practices. Thus, the symbolic ...